


Beneath Desert Stars

by devilinthedetails



Series: Cold Winds [2]
Category: PIERCE Tamora - Works, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Bazhir, Cold, Desert, Gen, Stars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:27:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25343935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilinthedetails/pseuds/devilinthedetails
Summary: Zahir and Vania walk beneath desert stars.
Series: Cold Winds [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1835392
Kudos: 8





	Beneath Desert Stars

Beneath Desert Stars

The Royal Progress had brought them sweeping like a sandstorm across the Great Southern Desert. The sun had set and the stars had risen in the jet black sky. It was Zahir’s favorite time of day. When the blazing heat had seeped from the sand, leaving it cool to the touch. When the coolness of the sand was mirrored in the gusts of wind dancing over the dunes, stirred up by the sudden, sharp drop in temperature. 

Since it was Zahir’s favorite time of day and he’d had no pressing duties to complete for the king, he’d asked his knightmaster for permission to walk among the dunes beneath the desert stars and been granted leave to do so. 

He’d wished to wander away from the tents flapping in the cold wind and slip off to solitude in the sands. He’d thought that King Jonathan had understood that without him having to do anything so undignified as explain it. His knightmaster related to that desperate need to be alone more than Zahir had dared to hope when he began to squire for the king. Perhaps because King Jonathan himself seemed to feel that desire for solitude more often than would be expected in a man renowned for his charisma and commanding presence. 

Yet, Zahir reflected, maybe that was precisely why the king sometimes needed to by himself—left to contemplate his own thoughts in silence. It could be draining to always be charming and in charge or at least to present such a face and front to the public. Exhaustion and bouts of brooding seemed especially likely to beset his knightmaster after sunset, but, of course that was the case. His knightmaster was the Voice of the Bazhir, after all, and it was at sunset that the Bazhir poured all the triumphs and struggles of the day into the vessel of the Voice, drinking solace and wisdom from the Voice in exchange. 

A weaker man than Zahir’s knightmaster might have collapsed under the pressure of being the king of Tortall or the Voice. There might have been nobody else born in many centuries who could have bent but not broken under the weight of being both the king of Tortall and the Voice—of representing all things to Bazhir and northerners alike and reconciling in his royal person the bloody conflict that had divided the two peoples of his realm since the reign of his grandfather. With that thought, Zahir believed he might understand Ali Mukhtab’s baffling choice to name a northern prince as his successor as Voice before Zahir was born beneath a burning desert sun. If his knightmaster brooded, Zahir decided, he had reason. He must have been torn between worlds almost as much as Zahir. 

“Zahir, wait!” Princess Vania’s most insistent tone halted Zahir in his tracks as he was about to step out of camp. She ran to catch up to him, heels and sand flying. “Papa says I can walk with you.” 

Zahir snorted, wondering if the king hadn’t understood his need for solitude after all, or if his knightmaster had just determined that Zahir’s brooding should be cut short by Vania’s boundless enthusiasm. With King Jonathan, it was always impossible to tell what the true and ulterior motivations might be. He was cunning as a snake. 

“He didn’t say you should wear a cloak, I see.” Zahir cast a critical glance over the youngest princess’s attire. No Bazhir would ever have roamed the night sands in such thin fabric. The desert winds got bone-cold after the sun set. Any true-blooded Bazhir knew that. 

“He did.” Vania’s smile sparkled in the silvery light of the quarter moon with a sweetness that promised nothing but mischief. A Bazhir girl would never have dared to disobey her father in such a flippant fashion, and she certainly wouldn’t have been smiling if she had. She’d have been weeping after being beaten bloody with a rod. “But I told him that I’d be fine without one, and he agreed that I could come out as I am.” 

To this, Zahir could only reply with an eloquent eye roll. Vania was as loud and confident a personality as her brother Roald was a quiet, unassuming one. She used her charm—inherited from her magnetic mother and father—to get her way when she could and her fierce will, also inherited from her stubborn parents, when that charm failed. She was spoiled, Zahir supposed, but somehow impossible to dislike, or at least impossible for him to dislike. He might snort and roll his eyes at her, but that didn’t mean he disliked her. It just meant he had an aloof, haughty appearance to maintain, and he sensed that she knew that—that there was no hostility for her behind his snorts and eye rolls. 

“There’s a chill in the air. The stars are shining cold tonight.” Vania’s arms were folded across her chest as if to shield herself from the chilly knives of wind slicing through her clothing. 

“They aren’t cold at all, though.” Zahir remembered something his father had told him late one night as they sat around a fire with a tent of stars overhead. “Each one burns as hot as our sun because our sun is a star. It’s just they are so far away that we can’t feel them burning into our skin as we do the sun.”

“Our sun is not a star!” Vania’s chattering teeth added an emphatic exclamation to her words. “The stars are tiny pinpricks of light. The sun is much larger than any star I’ve ever seen!” 

“The stars only seem like pinpricks because they’re so far away from us just as how a mountain seen at a great distance will look small.” Zahir hid a grin at her excitable ignorance. “Our sun would also seem small if seen from far away.” 

“I don’t like to think about that.” Vania shivered as if the dark vastness of the universe broken up only by distant stars whose heat was too far away to be felt made her even colder than the winds sweeping across the sand. “It makes me feel like ice inside.” 

Making the most chivalrous gesture he could, Zahir removed his cloak from his shoulders and draped it about hers. The cloak was far too big for her. It swallowed her and swamped around her feet, scraping in the sand with every step she took. 

Slipping his arm through hers as much as he could when hers was surrounded by his sagging cloak, he steered her back to the tent where her parents would be waited for her. He knew that it would take a long time to wipe all the sand from the bottom of his cloak, but he didn’t care. It’d been worth it for the freedom he felt under a quarter moon and beneath desert stars.


End file.
